A friend sent me an email with the results of the Bulwer-Lytton bad prose contest. A comment from the the writer of the article and the entry follow:

To take the prize for best purple prose, Mike Pedersen of North Berwick, Maine, relied on a thesaurus'-worth of synonyms:

"As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue."

Those are not synonyms, darlin', those are different shades of blue.